This post is part of a series about Pinoy Top Blogs. All figures and lists are based on 29 June 2006 data. Previous posts: 1 234567.

On 15 July 2006, Pinoy Top Blogs (PTB) will turn one year old. I never quite got around to doing the second part of "Blogs as Filipiniana, Part I," but I hope doing a series of posts about PTB will help me get around to Part II.

a project to aggregate the most popular and most read blogs in the Philippine blogosphere and rank them according to the number of unique visitors they get on a monthly basis.

More simply, it's a bestseller list. In the book industry, unique visits would count as sales, and instead of being updated weekly, the list is updated monthly.

One difference between a bestseller list and PTB is that a blogger must choose to have his/her blogs included in the list. This is one reason why there are blogs that appear in Technorati’s Philippine Top 100 Blogs, but not on PTB.

Due to the fact that PTB does not have an archive, the statistics that will be presented here will be based only on data as of 29 June 2006, the last day for which I was able to retrieve data from Google's cache. This study will also be limited to the Top 50.

Let me start by looking at the unique hits, which certainly provide evidence that the Pareto principle (aka 80-20 rule) applies even to blogs.

It is interesting that Rickey, by himself, accounts for about one-fourth of all unique hits in the Top 50. Along with Bryanboy, the Top 2 make up about 40 percent. Perhaps the fact that both of them seem to have predominantly non-Filipino readers (I know this about Rickey's audience, but I'm just guessing with Bryanboy) has a great deal to do with their very high stats.

The Top 3-10 blogs account for 30 percent, while the Top 11-20, 14 percent. And the rest of the Top 50? Not even as much as Rickey's total. The lesson for bloggers who want to place higher on PTB? Try to write for the non-Filipino audience, too.

Finally, to those who will inevitably ask, "What is so important about this list? Why analyze it at all?" This list is on the same level as INQ7's 10 most-read stories. In the greater scheme of things, it won't really change anything, but it will be important for a few people like advertisers and pop culture junkies who want to know what people are "buying." More on this in the next few days.